Online search engines provide an enormously powerful tool for accessing the vast amount of information available on the Internet in a structured and discriminating scheme. Popular search engines such as MSN®, Google® and Yahoo!® service tens of millions of queries for information every day. A typical search engine operates by a coordinated set of programs including a spider (also referred to as a “crawler” or “bot”) that gathers information from web pages on the World Wide Web in order to create entries for a search engine index; an indexing program that creates the index from the web pages that have been read; and a search program that receives a search query, compares it to the entries in the index, and returns results appropriate to the search query.
In typical search engines, search terms are weighted the same, and do not have a means for expressing relative importance of one search term relative to another. If a search is performed relating to real estate for example, and the formulated search query includes number of bedrooms, price, and square footage, the search engine will weigh each of these equally when generating the results. While there are search engines that do allow weighted searches, these search engines are cumbersome in that they do not allow the user to re-sort the results simply by reformulating the relative importance of terms in the search query. If a user wishes to alter the relative importance of search terms to obtain a reordering of the search results, a brand new search must be performed. At present, there is no convenient method for reordering search results without performing a whole new search.
Moreover, search results are typically provided as lines of text on the user interface, with the user having to sift through pages and pages of information to review the search results. This process is generally time consuming and tiresome.
A different but related concept is the organization of user-customized web portals, or homepages. At present, it is known for a user to populate a homepage on the user's graphical interface with content of interest to the user. The user may customize their webpage to receive content relating to a variety of topics, including for example current events, sports, hobbies, finance, etc. In order to reorganize the content on their webpage, the user must typically access a setup screen on the graphical user interface, and then select/deselect content, as well as indicating the desired position on the page. At present, there is no convenient method for reorganizing content without accessing the setup screen. The same is true for the organization of content across a wide variety of other software application programs which provide content to a user via a graphical user interface.